Musser 5.0 Octave Kelon Marimba For Sale (Job no. 1393)

Monday 30 January 2017

FOR SALE £ sensible offers

I have a Musser Kelon 5 octave marimba in my workshop for sale. I also must confess it has been in for a while – it is always good to ask if I have anything for sale because I generally do! The delays are generally having the time for me to sit down and write this blurb, clean, repair and set up the instrument for photo’s and video. Because 5 Octave marimbas are massive, they take up a huge amount of floor space which means that the workshop needs to be pretty empty in order to do that, and that never happens. So because the instrument has been hanging around for a while I decided to write this blurb and will upload the photo’s and video later.

Anyway, this instrument is on one of those massive field frames pictured above and consequently is built for the US market where they like things to be ridiculously heavy and ironically not very strong! My advice would be to ask me to replace the frame with something made a lot more transportable and usable. The frame is functional, but not very user friendly; spanners are needed to assemble it and this in itself suggests that it is meant to be transported whole which means that you would also need to buy a long wheel base van! My frames are bespoke, so we can discuss your requirements and I will advise accordingly.

The note bars are in good condition. These are the Kelon bars which are a type of glass fibre which makes them impervious to atmospheric conditions which makes them perfect for outside use. They sound OK, but because they are synthetic they completely lack the timbral quality of wooden note bars. However I am a bit picky when it comes to sound quality and know what I like and that is wood, but I am pleasantly surprised that the bars sound the way they do – my expectation was that I would hate the sound and actually it’s on the okay to nice scale (if that makes sense).

Because it is a marimba, the resonators are massive too! these are the wide ones which amplify the fundamental and give a really rich tone. For me, it is these resonators that is the reason for buying, everything else can be easily upgraded at a later date, but making resonators like these would be very involved which means very expensive. So they sound great, but they are big, and big things are heavy. It’s the general theme of this advert.